This is what we will be making:

Step 1: Open up a new canvas. Make it any size you want. Mine is 400×300.

Step 2: Fill canvas with black and make a new transparent layer.

Step 3: The fire will be made with 3 colors, red, yellow, and [...]]]> How to Make Fire or Flames with GIMP:

This is what we will be making:

Step 1: Open up a new canvas. Make it any size you want. Mine is 400×300.

Step 2: Fill canvas with black and make a new transparent layer.

Step 3: The fire will be made with 3 colors, red, yellow, and white. With your red color the basic shape of the fire, Similar to below.

Step 4: With your yellow brush make the second layer, make sure there is still red showing. See below.

Step 5: Repeat, now with white. Once your done with the red white and yellow, it should look similar to the screen below.

Step 6: The fire looks like it has been done by a 3-year-old. Now you will need to add a gaussian blur(Filters–>Blur–>Gaussian Blur). Set Vert and Horiz to 100. It should look similar to the image below.

Step 7: It looks alright but still doesn’t look realistic. Now make a new transparent layer and goto Filters–>Render–>Clouds–>Solid Noise. See the settings similar to below. X-Value=13 Y-Value=7

Step 7: Duplicate the layer with the clouds.

It should look like this by now;

Step 8: Now create a new transparent layer. And goto Filters–>Render–>Clouds–>Plasma. Turbulance=5

Step 9: And now goto Layers–>Colors–>Desaturate. And then set both cloud layers options to Overlay.

IF you want a little more random movement on the fire you can just goto filters–>distort–>IWarp. And play around with it.

All done!

For purposes of the exercise, create a blue background.

1. Create your text, using white for the font color (just for this tutorial). From the tool options, click the ‘Path from Text’ button. (This creates a path that outlines the text. 2. Create a new transparent layer called ‘Outline’. 3. From the menu bar, [...]]]>

Outlined Text with GIMP

For purposes of the exercise, create a blue background.

1. Create your text, using white for the font color (just for this tutorial). From the tool options, click the ‘Path from Text’ button. (This creates a path that outlines the text.
2. Create a new transparent layer called ‘Outline’.
3. From the menu bar, choose ‘Select… From Path’. (This selects an outline of the text on the new ‘Outline’ layer.)
4. From the menu bar, choose ‘Select… Grow’. Set the growth to 3 pixels. (This expands the selection in all directions by 3 pixels. Adjust as you see fit.)
5. Using the Fill tool, with black as the color, fill in the selection on the transparent ‘Outline’ layer.
6. Move the ‘Outline’ layer behind your text layer. Choose ‘Select… None’. Then you can anchor the text layer down onto the outline.

You’re done! Congrats!

Now that you have the basic concept, you can expand on it. Try varying the colors, the growth amount. Try using the GIMP quickmask after step 4 to modify the selection border to give different effects to text outline.

Now you know how to use Gimp to outline text!